Can’t You Wait Until I’m Dead? ~ Chapter 4: Blogging to Self-Awareness—The Sequel
Everything was going well enough near the end of the term, but the students’ stress over looming exams rubbed off on me, and five weeks later, I started thinking about death again. The post featured my last motorcycle, a grey 1982 Yamaha Virago 750.
On Riding to Live
24 April 2015 – I’ve been in a few crashes on bikes and in cars, and more near misses than I can count, and it runs in the family. My father warned me to stay away from motorcycles and scooters after he was nearly killed on one in his youth. He seemed fine to me, and his caution didn’t keep me away from them. As most do, I started out on bicycles and never intended to drive a motorcycle until I moved to Los Angeles. It was in that least bicycle and pedestrian-friendly city of the late 80s that I parked my Raleigh Gran Sport and Superbe and got my first motorcycle licence. I needed to get from Palms to Watts, and there was no safe way to do it on a bicycle. I could drive our trusty Plymouth Champ, but it was going to cost over $800 to park it, and my graduate student stipend put us below the poverty line. Much to my surprise, a motorcycle parking permit was only $40 a year. I took the driving test on a 50 cc Honda Aero scooter and soon discovered that it couldn’t keep up with traffic on Jefferson Blvd. I had to drive on the shoulder and even then, the cars whipping past me nearly took me out a few times. Chatting with a campus doctor who was prescribing penicillin for my allergies (another story), I was chided for wearing a helmet. She said, “Why would you want to end up a vegetable?”
I traded up to a 200 cc Vespa I bought from a woman who had crashed it, breaking her leg and damaging it a bit cosmetically. It had so much power that when I popped the clutch by mistake on the way home, the front wheel rose 45 degrees into the air (with my partner watching in the car behind). That thing was a death trap. Fun, but a death trap. The slightest bit of rain made the streets a little slick, but on those two tiny wheels, with that overpowered two-stroke engine, it was made to skid. I sold it to a lawyer who said he planned to crash it to make a point in an injury case. I had put a bit of work into it, painting it a bright red, reupholstering the seat, and working on the clutch, so I hesitated when he announced his plans for it, but he was offering twice what I paid for it!
I traded up again to a 1989 Suzuki GS450 that someone moving out of town was selling. Although it was safer to drive than the two scooters, I instantly became aware of my mortality. I had the feeling that every morning would be my last, so I spent a good 10 minutes after breakfast saying goodbye to my partner. I rode as if anything could happen. As though I were invisible to every car around me, with the fear that death was milliseconds away. If a daydream tried to distract me, I pushed it out of my head. I concentrated on everything around me. I watched 4-5 cars ahead. Stayed out of blind spots. Watched the rear-view mirror and tapped my brakes if someone got too close. Learned the body language of cars—how they swerved just a little before they made a lane change. They always announced in some small way what they were going to do before they did it.
So it went for years. Never had an accident with a car. Never dropped a motorcycle, and my last one, a 1982 Yamaha Virago 750, was sold when I changed jobs and couldn’t didn’t drive it enough to keep it running. I’ve been commuting on a bicycle daily now for six years with the same fear keeping me alive. Every week, someone runs a stop sign, a red light, or turns left in front of me, but I’ve been fortunate enough to have both hands on the brakes and to know where and when it’s going to happen. Black ice is my Achilles heel. Distracted mornings, I’ve hit ice badly enough to be concussed, and one morning, I rode too close to a parked car and had a door opened in front of me. But when I stop fearing death…I know it’s a cliche in every Hollywood cop movie, but the day my thoughts turn to retirement will be the day I’ll get an unpleasant surprise and my partner will get a knock on the door.
***
My subconscious was trying to tell me that if I didn’t deal with my gender issues, depression, and suicidal ideation were the inevitable psychic crash. I wasn’t listening.
Two weeks later, Mom and I got into a debate about how parents and families should raise kids, with my brother’s two kids as prime examples of siblings assigned male and female at birth. I argued they should be free to discover their gender, grow their hair to any length they wanted, and play with any toys they liked. She took the position that boys should get haircuts and dress like boys, girls like girls. She said the natural binary of male and female would prevail over any nurturing, and it was better to encourage them to grow into men and women. I wasn’t ready to discuss my angst over my own gendered upbringing and how my brain biology was fighting against my “biological sex,” so I changed the subject.
After we hung up, I borrowed some of Sarah’s cherry red nail polish and painted my toenails for the first time. I justified it as necessary since toenail fungus had curved and disfigured one of the big ones, and I sent Sarah a video of a father who let his daughter paint his nails as my inspiration. When I looked down at my feet in the shower, I was a little more relaxed, less anxious, and more confident that I could overcome my internalized transphobia. Painted toenails were one more step toward expressing myself after coming out as vegan, piercing my ears, and wearing a necklace.
I had to work through my “mommy issues” in a blog post on Mother’s Day. It featured a photo of Mom feeding me baby food from a jar.
On Mothers
10 May 2015 – Learning that mothers are as complicated as the rest of us took a long time for me. I idealized Mom, as most children probably do, and believed that there wasn’t one among them who would do me any harm. Don’t all mothers have a child’s best interest at heart? The worst thing that I remember happening between us occurred when I was three or four. She was trying to vacuum, and I found myself unable to stop imitating the vacuum cleaner as it ran, trying my best to match the sound of its whoosh and hum. It was just a little slap, but I learned to listen to her more attentively, and after all, she didn’t mean it personally; she just snapped. Dad was given the job of disciplinarian and gave me at least one spanking.
Mom was the one who taught us how to fish, took us to the beach, and tended to our scrapes and bruises. She worked full time as a medical office assistant to save for our education and pay for violin lessons out of her own chequing account. When she got home, she still had to cook dinner. After dinner, she drove me to choir and orchestra and waited for me to finish. I couldn’t imagine anyone more devoted and less selfish. She was the person I aspired most to be.
It wasn’t until I was almost thirty that she left my father for a friend of the family, explaining that she had never really loved him. Her mother told her that she wouldn’t do any better and should accept his offer of marriage. She had considered leaving him before I was born, but never found the right opportunity. She and my father applied for an adoption when they had trouble conceiving, but were turned down when they didn’t look like happy parent material. When I came along, she had already resigned herself to never finding love.
Striking up with the divorced father of our closest childhood friends offered Mom a new start, but it came with resistance from my brother and the loss of some old friends who took sides. My father’s ill-advised second marriage led to his suicide and caused her guilt from which she will never recover. Having worked with some women who would ruin me if they could, I’ve come to accept that all of us, regardless of gender, can be callous, careless, and selfish sometimes.
I’m not saying that I don’t want to celebrate Mother’s Day. I love her. I exist because of her and my father, of course. She taught me more than anyone else on the planet. It’s just that the celebration of it is not as simple as it was when I was younger.
***
The next week, my thoughts turned to the possibility of everything in my life going up in flames. If I transitioned, I could lose Sarah, my family, and the respect of peers and students. It would be like that time I nearly burned down the family’s garage when I ignited a model car I’d once built and loved. I had to write about it to separate the memory from the future I feared. The post featured a photo of the orange 1976 Datsun 280ZX plastic model from the manufacturer’s website.
On Flammability
18 May 2015 – What is it about youth and fire? One of my childhood friends, Brian, introduced me to fire. He poured some gasoline into an empty hot chocolate tin, tilted it sideways on a piece of wood, and dropped a match into it. It lit with a big “poof” of flame, and the next thing I remember, we were running from his mother.
I decided a year later to try fire myself and found the perfect opportunity in a model car, an orange Datsun 280ZX, that had outlived my pride and excitement in it. To avoid the prying eyes of the neighbours, I took it into the garage and set it on a piece of Styrofoam to protect the pristine concrete floor. I opened the gas can we used to fill the lawn mower, poured a little gas over it, noticing that the Styrofoam melted a little when the gas dripped onto it. A match turned it into a beautiful little fire, but soon, to my shock and horror, the Styrofoam block caught on fire! I found an old coffee can next to the door, ran back to the house, and filled it with water. By the time I got back to the garage, the flames were almost to the rafters, and I was afraid I was done for when the garage burned down.
Fortunately, water put out the charred mess quickly. Unfortunately, the new concrete garage floor had a large black spot just under where my father would soon park the family car. I tried first to scrub it off with soap and water, and then turpentine, but it was permanently etched. With only minutes left to save myself from a dressing down or spanking, I poured a little motor oil on it and covered it with kitty litter, as though soaking up an accidental oil spill.
I never discovered whether my camouflage worked and they never noticed, or whether mom talked dad out of discipline, but the story ended, maybe sadly, without any drama, leaving me with a lifelong unanswered question. I had sated my pyromania and finally learned not to play with fire.
***
At the end of June, teaching came to a close for the academic year, and my dark thoughts returned. I looked at myself in the mirror one day, having just watched the 2012 film Les Misérables, and snapped. Fantine’s plight ate into me, and an image from the movie kept replaying in my head. I ran to the drugstore, bought the only electric trimmer on the shelf, and shaved my head, imagining I was Fantine, played by Anne Hathaway, selling her hair to support her illegitimate daughter. Anne Hathaway’s real tears flowed as actor Nicola Sloane cut her hair, but she was still a beautiful woman. Unlike Anne Hathaway, my hair was uneven stubble with bald spots, and I looked more manly, in a crazed “I-shaved-off-my-own-hair” sort of way. Even worse, I had to pay a barber to fix it. Life seemed as cruel and unfair as Victor Hugo’s France in the early 1800s.
On a walk by the river, a month later, I saw an art installation with a series of large chalkboards attached to a chain-link fence. The chalkboards repeated the phrase “BEFORE I DIE I WANT TO _____” thirteen times, alternating in different languages. I thought for a few seconds and wrote in my wobbly block printing, “WEAR A DRESS IN PUBLIC.” I didn’t think it would ever happen and cried behind my sunglasses on the way home. There had to be a medical explanation for my tears.
Maybe better sleep was the solution. Although the sleep study (polysomnography) didn’t show sleep apnea, the doctor suggested I give a free trial of CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) a go for a month. The sleek black and chrome device plugged into a mask and kept my throat open while I slept. It had a SIM card and connected to the mobile network so a sleep technician could monitor whether my breathing stopped. “Some people without apnea find their sleep improves so much that they’d never sleep without it again,” he said.
Night after night for a month, I kissed Sarah goodnight and strapped the mask to my face, hoping something miraculous might happen to my sleepiness, my gender identity, or both. Instead, the machine hissed, the mask put pressure on my face, and I couldn’t sleep on my stomach. It was like one step forward and one step back. I wasn’t losing anything, but I wasn’t gaining anything either. I loved the technology behind the new machine, and insurance paid for it, but I just didn’t love it enough to wear it to bed again. It wasn’t the simple fix for my gender problem.
The summer of 2015 ended abruptly the day after Labour Day, when classes started again. I threw myself back into teaching and research ethics and tried to put gender out of my mind for good.